


What Happens in Red

by stelliferous_sky



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Baby Pictures, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Keith was born with a mullet, Krolia decides to do something about her pining sons, Lance is dyslexic, Light Angst, M/M, Not Beta Read, Post-Season/Series 06, Space Road Trip, mainly Lance and Krolia bonding, we die like warriors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-01 20:35:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17250977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stelliferous_sky/pseuds/stelliferous_sky
Summary: Krolia used to think that things she saw in the quantum abyss would happen in the distant future. But with a bit of help, maybe it doesn't have to be so distant.And as it turns out, all Keith and Lance needed is that little nudge in the right direction.





	What Happens in Red

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic after season 7 came out but I never posted it then because I wrote it mainly for myself. But now that VLD is officially over I want to share it with others too.

  Krolia had seen some things.

  She’d seen the fall of the Mighty Kotetts, one of the greatest warrior races in the known universe.

  She’d seen supernovas and black holes keep entire battle fleets at event horizon for weeks before total disappearance.

  She’d seen Kolivan smile at his little daughter and wife who were now long gone.

  But she’d never seen pining like this. It was the suffocating type that consisted of intense stare-downs and shit-talk flirts that made _everyone_ uncomfortable and no one wanted to address. Even if she hadn’t seen the things she had through the quantum abyss, there would be no mistaking the feelings hidden behind the stares and teases.

  In short, her son was an idiot and so was Lance.

  With literally nothing else better to do than listen to Coran sing terrible Altean jigs through the entire journey to Earth, Krolia was taking it upon herself to do something about that pine-fest.

  There was no talking to Keith about it. In the two years she’d spent with him, he’d never once mentioned Lance alone. The name only came up when it needed to when he talked about the rest of the paladins too. Even then, there were no specific details about Lance that stuck out that Krolia assumed whatever she saw in the quantum field would happen in the future – that his feelings would happen in the future.

  Two seconds in the room together and Krolia realised she’d been so wrong.

  One day she finally managed to get Keith alone in Black’s cockpit, what with a lot of people and animals cramped into five lions. She casually leaned against the seat.

  “Your friends seem nice,” she started and Keith tensed, sensing a mother-son conversation coming on.

  He’d gotten better at communication. She’d seen her son grow and mature and become more accepting. But he still didn’t like talking about personal things.

  “Yeah,” he said a bit too casually. “They’re pretty cool people. Most of the time.” He didn’t hide the fondness in his voice, which was good.

  “You met them all at the Garrison?”

  He hummed in affirmation. “Except Pidge. I met her brother through Shiro.”

  “Does _Lonce_ have something against you?”

  Keith snorted in laughter, his hands shaking on the stick which made lion shudder in response. “It’s actually _Lance._ Only Allura says Lonce.” Maybe, but Keith definitely said it differently to how everyone else said it too; softer and more carefully like if he said it wrong, the name would shatter. Then his tone changed. “And I- I honestly don’t know what his problem with me is. He’s been a bigger jerk to me than he used to be.”

  Krolia pretended to think for a while. “I think you haven’t been as nice to him either. A leader and his right hand need a good relationship, Keith, or the team falls apart.”

  A blush tinted his cheeks as he looked away. “I know.”

  “Why are you hostile towards him?”

  He grumbled, “I don’t know where we stand anymore. Everyone else isn’t different to what I remember but Lance doesn’t feel like Lance anymore. I’m just- I’m trying to figure him out again.”

  “Maybe you should talk to him.”

  “Maybe.”

  That tone meant the conversation wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

  “Think about the team, Keith,” Krolia said as parting words. With that she gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze and strolled out of the cockpit. She muttered to herself, “Maybe I’ll have a talk with Lance.”

  She swore she heard a distressed squeak as the doors closed.

*

  After Lance’s disaster of a travel plan, the passengers had taken to switching up every time they landed just so no one went insane from being so up close and personal all the time. The next time they landed on an uninhabited rogue planet for a much needed break, Krolia offered to ride with Lance.

  Both Keith and Lance choked but neither said anything, looking at each other in silent communication.

  Lance’s face said, “Help me.”

  Keith’s face said, “Good luck.”

  They were so cute.

  So Krolia was in Red for the next few days until they stopped again. Red might’ve once been Keith’s lion but now it was definitely Lance’s. Sketches and photos of the paladins were stuck on the walls and boxes were arranged into a makeshift living area with a few items of clothes strewn here and there.

  Lance was unexpectedly silent for the first few minutes after takeoff. Krolia gave him time to adjust. She’d been told by more than one paladin that her presence was ‘like having an older, scarier, female version of Keith’. Pidge had also said that having a mother-figure again for the first time in months was nerve-wrecking. So Krolia got the general idea that she came off as a bit intimidating.

  Finally Lance asked, “So are you here to, like, see if I’ve got your approval to be Keith’s second or something?”

  “You have Keith’s approval, so you have mine.”

  Lance’s head snapped back to where she leaned on the side of the cockpit. “I do?”

  “Of course.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. So... Why are you riding with me then?”

  Krolia shrugged. “Does there have to be a particular reason?”

  Lance considered his answer for a second. “Well, no but I just got the vibe that you’d want to ride with Keith because, you know, he’s your son.”

  She softened her tone a little. “Lance, I’ve had no one but Keith and Kosmo for the past two years. I love him but I’d also like a break from him time to time. Besides, his hair is an eye-sore and he won’t let me cut it.”

  Lance’s face lit up like she knew it would. “I know, right! And he gets angry at me for making fun of it.”

  And this was the Lance when he was with the others, the relaxed and happy goofball who could dissipate any sort of tension in the room (except his own with Keith).

  “He was born like that,” Krolia said.

  Lance’s eyes had gone wide, pupils blown out and eyebrows in his hairline. Then he was howling in laughter.

  Krolia added, “His dad said he took after me.”

  Lance shut up immediately. “Oh. Oh, um. That must be why he’s beautiful?” It took a full three seconds of silence for him to realise what he said. And then- “Quiznak! I mean, _you’re_ beautiful, ma’am. Not Keith. His mullet his definitely not cool but your hair is like gift of the gods, you know. So...long and...”

  Krolia was thoroughly unimpressed but she laughed a little at the boy going redder than the screens around him.

  He groaned, burying his face in his hands. “Please don’t tell him I said that.”

  “I won’t.”

  Lance sighed and muttered, “I can’t believe I’ve already said Keith is beautiful within ten minutes of having his mum with me.”

  “How about whatever happens in Red stays in Red?” she suggested.

  “Deal.”

 

  And that was that.

  Living with Lance was almost as annoying as living with Coran but at least when Lance sang, he sounded good. The boy either constantly hummed to himself or full on sang his heart out in a language she didn’t know, sometimes adding dance moves when he could. He also took some of her requests, albeit with a judgemental look before singing them anyway.

  She knew the songs were out of date by probably about two and a half decades. (And yet he knew them.)

  The first night, with Krolia taking Lance’s bed and the boy on a blanket on the floor, he asked about the history behind the songs she wanted. All of them involved Keith’s dad. The first song she heard on the radio when she woke up in his house, the first song he sang for her, the song they’d danced to and his favourites.

  Lance was quiet for a few minutes. “How old was Keith when you left Earth?”

  “Thirteen months. And his dad... He died when Keith was nine.”

  Lance breathed out. “No wonder Keith was always touchy about his family. I mean, I sort of knew? He punched this kid back at the Garrison for making fun of his parents but like. Damn.”

  Krolia almost didn’t want to go back to Earth, if only so she could keep pretending that Akira was alive. She had to keep reminding herself that at least Keith was here, after all these years. At least he still had one parent left.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t have many family photos, huh?” Lance asked.

  “Actually.”

  She opened a hologram with the communicator on her wrist and projected a picture. Keith, only two months old here, lay in between her and Akira, his big eyes wide in curiosity. She showed it to Lance, who immediately gasped.

  “Oh, my god. He _was_ born with a mullet.”

  She swiped to another photo. Keith had lost interest in the camera. He’d taken to grabbing Akira’s nose, his tiny body twisted to reach up.

  Lance was sitting up now. “Oh, my god,” he repeated, eyes shining. “Oh, my god. Why the heck was he so cute?”

  Krolia went through the entire file of almost three hundred photos. Most were of Keith, in some he was with one of them and a dozen or so “family photos” taken at various points in time. Krolia had these stored in no less than five different places in case she ever lost one place. Lance eagerly swiped through all the photos, cooing and laughing and muttering how he regretted making that deal about whatever they said in Red stayed in Red.

  “This,” he’d said, “will make such good blackmail material.”

  “What about your family?” Krolia asked.

  A nostalgic smile passed over his face. “Oh, my family’s huge. I’m the youngest of five siblings. Actually Rachel and I are twins but she’s twelve minutes older so apparently I’m the baby of the family.”

  And that launched into Lance rambling on about his larger than life family and how he missed all of them even though they were annoying at times and how he couldn’t wait to see them again. Krolia let him because the excitement that lit up his face, lit her up inside.

  It was probably too early for her to start thinking of Lance as another son.

  She didn’t mind that Lance kept her up. But she didn’t let him sleep in. To her surprise, he had no complaints about getting five hours of sleep. Wasn’t even grumpy. He just got up and dove straight for the shower where he pretended he was in a yodelling competition with himself. She supposed fighting in a war tended to numb someone to ungodly amount of sleep.

  Then all sympathy went out the window when Lance began his thirty-minute long skin care routine.

  Even so, it wasn’t fair on them. They were only kids. They were meant to be worried about high school, university and crushes, not defeating forces of evil.

  It was hard to remember that with Keith. He was always alert and ready to fight, knife always half raised like he’d been doing it his whole life, like he was born into this life. Only on rare occasions that he let himself be carefree. Lance, Pidge and Hunk were children at heart and it showed in their conversations about Earth TV shows and something called ‘memes’ that Keith didn’t get and Shiro looked like he wished he didn’t. 

  Pidge was the first to come online for the daily ‘morning’ sound offs.

  “Pidge and Romelle here.”

  “Allura and Coran here.”

  “Lance and Krolia here.”

  “Hey, Lance is still alive!” Hunk said, his video feed popping up next to Pidge’s with Shiro in the background.

  “Well, duh!” Lance said. “Krolia and I had some pretty sweet bonding moments last night.”

  “You what?” That was Keith, glaring at Lance, with Kosmo desperately trying to get in the frame.

  Lance smirked. “Oh, hey Keith.”

  Keith gave Krolia a wry look. “Mum?”

  Everyone was staring curiously at her too but she only shrugged. “Lance and I have an agreement, Keith. I’m not saying anything.”

  “Okay, now I really need to know,” Hunk said.

  “Let’s just say,” Lance said, cracking his knuckles dramatically, “I would have some amazing blackmail material if I was actually allowed to talk about it.”

  Keith’s jaw dropped. “ _No._ Tell me you didn’t.”

  Krolia said nothing.

  “You didn’t _give_ them to him, right?” Keith went on, getting right up to the camera.

  Lance was howling in laughter now.

  “I didn’t,” she reassured over Lance’s guffaw. Never mind that Krolia actually really wanted to share her precious memories with everyone.

  Keith just groaned, burying his face in his hands. “Why _him_ out of everyone else, Mum?”

  “What’s going on?” Allura said and her confusion went ignored.

  “But you were adorable though!” Lance cried, throwing his arms into the air, then slapped his hands over his mouth. “Oops. Never mind. I didn’t say anything.”

  A blush crawled up Keith’s neck as he narrowed his eyes at Lance.

  Pidge caught on. “Wait... Don’t tell me. Do you have Keith’s baby photos?”

  “Oooh, I gotta see this!” Hunk said. “Keith, come on, man! I’ll show you my baby photos when we get back to Earth.”

  Soon everyone was begging Keith to let them see the photos and only Shiro was really trying to stop everyone. Even so it was completely half-hearted. Surprisingly Lance stayed quiet. Even more surprisingly Keith didn’t need much convincing to let the others see the photos. So Krolia hooked her communicator up to Red’s controls and displayed the photos across all the lions.

  Lance looked troubled, staring at Keith who was bright red from all the attention, absently petting Kosmo’s head.

  “Are you okay?” Krolia asked quietly.

  “Yeah, yeah. Why wouldn’t I be? I’m just gonna go get a drink.”

  And then he was gone. Keith noticed, looking to Krolia questioningly. She considered going after Lance but he was back before she could make a decision. He was back to grinning and he joined in cooing over the pictures. She pretended she didn’t see the wrinkles around his eyes when he forced his face to do things his heart didn’t agree with, like smiling.

 

  The rest of the day was quiet as usual. Pidge hadn’t yet managed to get a message out to Earth, or to anyone else for that matter. Even if the lions were damaged and low on power, this was strange but no one wanted to say it outright just yet.

  Lance took to drawing on his datapad while humming the song Krolia and Akira first danced to. She remembered being utterly uncoordinated and stepping on his feet so many times but she wouldn’t have changed a single thing.

  She looked over Lance’s shoulder at the drawing of a baby squeezing a hippo plushy as he stared up at the camera. 

  “Is that Keith?”

  Lance screamed and jumped five feet off the chair. “Holy quiznak! Don’t do that, Krolia!”

  “Sorry.”

  Lance hid the screen from her. “That wasn’t Keith. That was some other baby who has a mullet...”

  “Really. It’s good. When did you learn to draw?”

  “Since I started school. I have dyslexia so I used to struggle a lot at school. My grade one teacher suggested that I draw instead of writing and I’ve been doing that ever since.”

  Krolia linked his words to what Keith once said about a rivalry between them back at the Garrison. “Does Keith know you have learning disabilities?”

  Lance snorted, training his attention back onto the drawing. “No. He and I weren’t exactly friends back at the Garrison.”

  “I’ve heard about that.”

  A flush crept over his face again. “Yeah,” he said absent-mindedly. “I mean, I didn’t want to use dyslexia as an excuse for not getting marks as high as him, you know? But even with that I was doing all right in my classes and stuff so I didn’t really mind. But the simulator was the one thing I could’ve been better than him at and of course, he freaking breaks records on that too so I was just really angry.”

  Then he paused for a second. “Why am I telling that to his mum anyway?”

  “The question is, why aren’t you telling that to Keith?”

  “Because he didn’t do anything,” Lance said in frustration. “He didn’t even remember me at first when we rescued Shiro. The problem was the fact that I hated him and he didn’t even know I existed so I’m the idiot here.”

  That wasn’t true. Keith said he met Lance and Hunk at the Garrison when he ran into Hunk on the first day there, making him, Hunk and Lance, who was behind Hunk, all fall down. But Krolia didn’t say any of that as Lance almost aggressively coloured in Keith’s hair.

  “That was the problem then,” she said. “So what’s the problem now?”

  “Nothing. I don’t have a problem.”

  He wasn’t ready to talk so she let him be. But it was quickly becoming clear that there was a lot of miscommunication between the two of them.

 

  Krolia probably should’ve noticed something earlier; Akira’s gloves peeking out from a bag Lance had dumped in the corner of the ‘bedroom’. But she didn’t see them until the second night when Lance started his night time skincare routine and the gloves fell out as he took out miscellaneous bottles.

  He rushed to shove them back in but she’d already seen them and she was sitting up in bed.

  “What are those?”

  He held up a bottle like she was an idiot. “This? Oh, I got this from one of the planets we went to. Amazing for moisturising. Wanna try it?” The words came out in one long string with no pause.

  Krolia gave him a look. “Lance.”

  His shoulders slumped and with a pout, he pulled out the pair of gloves. “Fine. They’re Keith’s gloves. I found them lying around when he left the team so I was keeping them safe so the mice don’t chew them up. Here, you can give them back if you want.”

  Krolia slid off the bed and sat next to him, pushing his extended hand back. “You can give them back yourself.”

  “No, he’s just gonna ask why I kept them and not put it in his room.”

  “Then why don’t you tell him?”

  “Because-” he started but stopped himself and shrugged. “He’s probably gonna get angry at me or something.” He picked at the fraying ends of the gloves.

  Suddenly this wasn’t the loud, obnoxious boy who sang at the top of his lungs and flirted with everything that walked. This was the quiet boy who drew pictures to find solace and whimpered in his sleep, the one whose face fell in the middle of a conversation when no one paid him any mind. 

  Krolia tried, “I know Keith isn’t the easiest person to talk to but he cares about his friends. He cares about you too. I think you two are long overdue for a conversation.”

  “About what?” It sounded terribly bitter.

  “You tell me.”

  “I have nothing to say to him. You can give the gloves back.”

  He slapped the gloves on the floor, bunched up his bottles and tubes in his arms and strutted off into the bathroom.

 

  In Red’s cockpit, Krolia opened a channel to Black. Keith came on a few seconds later.

  “Mum? Is everything okay?”

  “Lance is angry at you.”

  Keith’s face was a mixture of surprise and concern. “Why?”

  “You tell me, Keith.”

  Keith didn’t know.

 

  Lance was in the shower for a long time.

 

  The next day, he didn’t talk to her much. At this point, he’d have realised exactly why Krolia wanted to ride with him and was probably regretting not opposing that idea when he had the chance. They weren’t due to land for two more days.

  She’d known this boy for a total of three weeks but knew the quietness wasn’t normal behaviour. She wondered if she’d made him feel worse than before.

  She tried to engage him in conversations about his friends and teammates.

  “Yeah, they’re great people!” he said cheerily enough to sound fake. “Hunk is the best and Pidge is like this sarcastic gremlin little sister I never had. I met Hunk first at the Garrison and then Pidge got there and we got into so much trouble that all the teachers called us the Terror Trio. Great times.”

  “Space must have been fun for you three then, no one to tell you off.”

  He barked a laugh. “Ha! Allura tells us off often enough. But we haven’t really been up to much anyway. We’ve got our own jobs out here.”

  That was the end of that talk. Krolia got the distinct impression there was so much more he wasn’t saying and his pent up feelings included ones regarding not only Keith but the others too.

 

  Finally, late in the afternoon Lance said, “Is this some sort of intervention? Are you trying to be my therapist or something?”

  He was turned in his pilot seat, Krolia sitting against the back wall, drawing up a more challenging training program. Neither had spoken in a while. An earth road-trip game the others were playing over the communication lines had finished a few minutes ago. It was silent in Red.

  Krolia looked up. “I’m trying to be a friend.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way but that’s kind of weird. You’re Keith’s _mum_. You barely know me.” He paused. “Unless Keith told you crap about me.”

  “He hasn’t.”

  A scoff.

  Krolia stood. “I just thought you might want someone to talk to – a friend, or a mother, whoever you need.”

  “I have friends I can talk to. Plus I can talk to mum when we get back to Earth. I’m perfectly fine.”

  She sat on her heels so that she was eye-level with Lance, a hand on his shoulder. “If you were, you wouldn’t be trying so hard to convince me.”

  For a moment there was nothing but steeled defiance in his eyes. Then all of it left his body like a light had been switched off, leaving him with sagged shoulders and head hanging low.

  He gave in quietly. “Okay, maybe I’m not fine. I just-I just need to sort myself out. That’s all. And everything will go back to normal.”

  “And how long have you been trying to sort things out?”

  He didn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t know. Since Keith left? Since we left Earth?”

  That was a surprise but it probably shouldn’t have been. “Why do you say that?”

   Lance shrugged. “We came to space and everything I thought I knew turns out to be complete bullshit. I don’t mean the aliens and stuff. Those are probably the most normal out of everything. Back at the Garrison, I knew exactly who I was. I had two amazing best friends. I know that isn’t much but we were peas in a pod.”

  He didn’t continue so Krolia waited for the words on the tip of his tongue.

  It didn’t take long. “We started fighting the Galra and I missed my family. Pidge and Hunk were off doing smart techie things, Keith and Shiro were really close, Allura and Coran were all strategies and magic stuff and I was just... there, you know.

  “And then Shiro went missing and I always feel like a shitty person when I think about it but I can’t help it. With Shiro gone, Keith was as alone as I was and I thought maybe we could actually try to be friends. I mean, I never really hated him. I just hated how untouchable he felt so yeah, I tried to reach out and we were becoming friends, or something other than rivals.”

  Behind Lance, a channel had opened up from Keith but the boy didn’t notice. Even with Krolia trying to let him know, Lance kept going like he couldn’t stop the words once they started falling.

  “Like, we trained together sometimes and we could talk and be stupid and both of us would be totally clueless about anything Pidge and Hunk tried to say so yeah, I... I thought we bonded. I thought we were actually getting somewhere. I thought I finally had a best friend I could really relate to. I was his second and he made me feel like I was finally contributing to the team for the first time since we came into space. Hell, I actually let myself fall for him. Then he ditched the team, Krolia.” The words were spat in pain.

  “Lance-”

  He wasn’t listening. “Apparently Voltron wasn’t enough for him because he went gallivanting around the universe with the Blade of Marmora. Yeah, I get that if he didn’t he’d never have met you and I know he deserves you but it’s just- We weren’t enough for him. _I_ wasn’t enough for him.”

  A blinding flash of light came from Keith’s video feed, which got Lance’s attention. But Keith had disappeared from the unmistakeably purple frame of Black.

  Lance stood, eyes bulging. “Shit.”

  The flash appeared again, but in Red’s cockpit this time. Keith was there, next to Kosmo, and he looked at Lance with an unreadable expression that usually meant he was feeling too many emotions to show any one.

  Keith lunged for Lance.

  And pulled him into a hug. “You are enough,” he whispered. “You’re always enough, Lance.”

  Lance was frozen. “ _Shiiiiit_. How much did you hear?”

  “I heard enough.”

  Krolia quietly slipped to Kosmo and went back to Black.

  In the video feed over Black’s control, the two boys clung onto each other, arms wound tight and faces buried in the other’s shoulders.

  Krolia turned the channel off.

 

  They were in Red for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. As always, kudos and comments are very very much appreciated.  
> You can stalk me on Tumblr at [hano-does-fandoms](https://hano-does-fandoms.tumblr.com)


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